the Meuse and the level plateau, which appears in the dispatches from
the front as the Woevre, is a long, narrow ridge, running from north
to south for perhaps thirty-five or forty miles. This is the Cote de
Meuse, or, translated, the Hills of the Meuse. The range is never more
than ten miles wide and at many points less than half as wide. On the
west it rises very sharply from the Meuse and on the east it breaks
down quite as abruptly into the Woevre Plain. It cannot be effectively
approached from the Woevre, because the Woevre is an exceedingly
marshy plain, with much sub-surface water and in spring a mass of
liquid clay.
Now the French, when the German drive began, stood on this ridge some
eight miles, rather less, perhaps, to the north of the town of Verdun;
their line ran from the Meuse straight east along this ridge and then
turned at right angles and came south along the eastern edge of the
Meuse Hills and the shore of the Woevre Plain until it touched the
river again at St. Mihiel, twenty miles to the south, where the
Germans had broken through the Meuse Hills and reached the river. The
German attack came south along the crest of this ridge because the
German heavy artillery could not be brought over the Woevre.
About halfway between the French front and Verdun, on a little crest
somewhat higher than the main ridge, the French had erected a line of
forts, just as they had on the Charny Ridge, Forts Douaumont and Vaux,
familiar names now, were the forts most distant from Verdun. But the
French here, as on the other side of the river, had come out of these
forts, abandoned and dismantled them, and taken to trenches much to
the north. It was upon these trenches that the main German attack
fell, and in the first days the French were pushed back until their
trench line followed the crests that bear the old forts, and at one
point, at Douaumont, the Germans had actually got possession of one of
the old forts; but the French trenches pass in front of this fort at a
distance of but a few hundred yards.
Now, in the first days of the battle the position of the French on
the east bank of the Meuse was just this: the troops facing north were
meeting and slowly yielding to a terrific drive coming south and
southwest; the rest of the troops that faced east toward the Woevre
were not attacked severely. But as the Germans came south, and when
they took Douaumont, they were able to reach the bridges across the
Meuse behind the French troops on the Meuse Hills and to destroy them
by indirect fire, and these French troops, more than a hundred
thousand probably, were fighting with their backs to a deep river and
exposed to destruction in case their lines did not hold.
In this situation Joffre proposed to take his troops behind the Meuse
and on the hills to the west and above the city, leaving the city to
the Germans. The French line would thus come north behind the Meuse
from St. Mihiel and then turn west above Verdun, following either the
Charny Ridge or else the Hills of Regret and Chaume, on either side
of the trough, described above, which the road to Paris follows.
If Verdun were a fortress actually; if either the old town or the
circle of forts outside had been of value, Joffre would not have
proposed this thing. But they were of no value. Verdun was once a
fortress barring the way to the Plain of Chalons, but the Germans were
in the plain, having come through Belgium by the back door, as it
were. The forts outside the city on the rim of the basin had already
been abandoned because they could have been destroyed by German heavy
artillery, as were those of Liege and Antwerp. Verdun was just a
position; but it was a difficult position to defend because of the
river, which cut off one-half the army and could be crossed only by
bridges, which were under indirect fire.
If the French had come back to the Charny Ridge, or even to the Regret
Hills south of the trough followed by the Paris-Metz road, they would
have stood on hills of patent military value; the trough is a natural
ditch in front. These hills are all trenched and prepared for defence.
The French would merely have shortened their lines and taken an easy
position to defend, instead of holding a bad position. But ultimately
this would have meant the relinquishing of Verdun, the little town
down in the valley below, now become a heap of ruins and having lost
its military value thirty years earlier, when heavy artillery began
its decisive success over the old fortifications.
The French did not retire, because the civil government overruled the
military; decided that the moral effect of the withdrawal from Verdun
would be disastrous to the French and advantageous to the Germans.
Instead of retiring, the French stood and held the hills beyond the
Charny Ridge, Dead Man's and 304; they hold them still and seem
determined to keep them. But remember that they can still retire to
the Charny Ridge if they choose, and only then find their best line
west of the Meuse, if they mean to hold on to the city of Verdun.
On the other hand, east of the River Meuse the French are
approximately in their last line. The hills and crests they hold upon
the Meuse Hills are some three or four miles from Verdun, but if the
French retired far they would begin to come down hill, with a deep
river at their backs. In consequence, whenever you hear that the
Germans have made some slight gain, taken a trench about Douaumont or
Vaux, you are certain to hear at once that the French have counter
attacked and retaken the lost ground.
The essential thing to remember is that the defence of Verdun is not
the defence of a position that has a great military value. The French
would be better off, would lose fewer men and run smaller risk of
considerable losses if they should quit the east bank of the Meuse and
occupy the hills back of Verdun on the west bank. On the west bank the
Germans have never made any material gain, and they have not come
within reach of the hills that bear the old forts. But the French
Government has decided that for political reason, for reasons that
affect the moral, not the military, situation, Verdun must not be
surrendered; hence the army is holding it at a cost of men less than
the Germans are paying to take it, but at a far greater cost than
would be necessary to hold the better positions west of the river.
The Germans have not made any gain of importance in nearly two months.
The French are very sure they will not come farther south. They are as
confident as men could be. But if the Germans should come farther
south and at last force the French to come back behind the river and
to the hills above the town, they would only win a moral victory. The
military situation would not be changed, unless they should also
pierce the French lines on the west of the river, and this is
absolutely unthinkable now.
If you think of Verdun city as a fortress you will put yourself in the
eighteenth century. It is just an abandoned town, mostly ashes and
completely ruined by a useless bombardment after the main German
advance had been checked. If you think of Verdun as a fortified
position, like Liege, which, if it fell, would bring disaster, as did
the fall of Liege, you are thinking in terms of the situation before
the war. The forts of this position have all been abandoned and the
French are fighting in trenches in all points save one outside this
circle of forts. If you think of Verdun as the gateway to anything,
you are thinking of something that doesn't exist. It was a gateway to
Central France, to the Plain of Chalons, from the German frontier
before the Germans came down into the Plain of Chalons from the north
through Belgium.
But if you think of Verdun as a place which has a great sentimental
value for both the French and the Germans; if you think of it as a
place which by reason of its importance in other days still preserves
a value in the minds of the mass of the French and German publics, a
town the taking of which would as a result of this wholly false
appraisal be reckoned in Germany as a great victory, which would
vastly encourage German masses and would be accepted in France as a
great defeat which would equally depress the French public, you will
think of the battle for Verdun as it is.
If you go to Verdun you will see that the estimate that the world has
placed upon it is illusory. You will see it is an abandoned town. You
will see, as I did, that great and famous forts are without guns, and
you will see, as I did, that the positions which the French have
prepared behind the Meuse and above the town are vastly stronger than
those which they have held successfully, in Lorraine or any other
place where the attacks have been bitter, for nearly two years.
There are no forts, fortifications, fortresses, in this war. There
are just trenches, and the Verdun sector is no exception. Verdun is
not surrounded; it is not invested. I went to the town from Bar-le-Duc
in an automobile without difficulty, and I ran back to Paris by
another road, through Chalons, with equal ease. The Germans have never
got within three miles of the town on any side; to the west of the
River Meuse they are not within six miles of it. They are not gaining,
and have not been gaining for weeks; they are merely fighting a
desperate trench campaign, and the French are fighting back, retaking
trenches on the east of the river, because they are in their last line
on this bank of the river, but paying less attention to German trench
gains on the west because the Germans are still far from the Charny
Ridge, their main position.
If Verdun falls, that is, if the French are compelled under pressure
or as a result of the cost of holding their present awkward position
to go back behind the river, they will lose fifty or a hundred square
miles of French territory, they will lose all the tremendous value of
the moral "lift" which the successful defence has brought, but they
will lose nothing else; and when the Germans have taken Verdun, the
ashes, the ruins, they will stop, because there is no object or value
in further attack. They are fighting for moral values, and the French
politician has overruled the French soldier and compelled him to
accept battle on unfavorable ground for this same moral value, but
against his military judgment. He has done it successfully. He expects
and France expects that he will continue to do it successfully, but in
the wholly remote contingency that he failed (I can only say that it
is a contingency no longer considered in France), a loss in moral
advantage would be the only consequence.
V
IN SIGHT OF THE PROMISED LAND--ON THE LORRAINE BATTLEFIELD
In the third week of August, 1914, a French army crossed the frontier
of Alsace-Lorraine and entered the Promised Land, toward which all
Frenchmen had looked in hope and sadness for forty-four years. The
long-forgotten communiques of that early period of the war reported
success after success, until at last it was announced that the
victorious French armies had reached Sarrebourg and Morhange, and were
astride the Strassburg-Metz Railroad. And then Berlin took up the cry,
and France and the world learned of a great German victory and of the
defeat and rout of the invading army. Even Paris conceded that the
retreat had begun and the "army of liberation" was crowding back
beyond the frontier and far within French territory.
Then the curtain of the censorship fell and the world turned to the
westward to watch the terrible battle for Paris. In the agony and
glory of the Marne the struggle along the Moselle was forgotten; the
Battle of Nancy, of Lorraine, was fought and won in the darkness, and
when the safety of Paris was assured the world looked toward the
Aisne, and then toward Flanders. So it came about that one of the
greatest battles of the whole war, one of the most important of the
French victories, the success that made the Marne possible, the rally
and stand of the French armies about Nancy, escaped the fame it
earned. Only in legend, in the romance of the Kaiser with his cavalry
waiting on the hills to enter the Lorraine capital, did the battle
live.
When I went to France one of the hopes I had cherished was that I
might be permitted to visit this battlefield, to see the ground on
which a great battle had been fought, that was still unknown country,
in the main, for those who have written on the war. The Lorraine field
was the field on which France and Germany had planned for a generation
to fight. Had the Germans respected the neutrality of Belgium, it is
by Nancy, by the gap between the Vosges and the hills of the Meuse,
that they must have broken into France. The Marne was a battlefield
which was reached by chance and fought over by hazard, but every foot
of the Lorraine country had been studied for the fight long years in
advance. Here war followed the natural course, followed the plans of
the general staff prepared years in advance. Indeed, I had treasured
over years a plan of the Battle of Nancy, contained in a French book
written years ago, which might serve as the basis for a history of
what happened, as it was written as a prophecy of what was to come.
When the Great General Staff was pleased to grant my request to see
the battlefield of Nancy I was advised to travel by train to that
town accompanied by an officer from the General Staff, and informed
that I should there meet an officer of the garrison, who would conduct
me to all points of interest and explain in detail the various phases
of the conflict. Thus it fell out, and I have to thank Commandant
Leroux for the courtesy and consideration which made this excursion
successful.
In peace time one goes from Paris to Nancy in five hours, and the
distance is about that from New York to Boston, by Springfield. In war
all is different, and the time almost doubled. Yet there are
compensations. Think of the New York-Boston trip as bringing you
beyond New Haven to the exact rear of battle, of battle but fifteen
miles away, with the guns booming in the distance and the aeroplanes
and balloons in full view. Think also of this same trip, which from
Hartford to Worchester follows the line of a battle not yet two years
old, a battle that has left its traces in ruined villages, in
shattered houses. On either side of the railroad track the graves
descend to meet the embankments; you can mark the advance and the
retreat by the crosses which fill the fields. The gardens that touch
the railroad and extend to the rear of houses in the little towns are
filled with graves. Each enclosure has been fought for at the point of
the bayonet, and every garden wall recalls the Chateau of Hougoumont,
at Waterloo.
All this was two years ago, but there is to-day, also. East of
Bar-le-Duc the main line is cut by German shell fire now. From Fort
Camp des Romains above St. Mihiel German guns sweep the railroad near
Commercy, and one has to turn south by a long detour, as if one went
to Boston by Fitchburg, travel south through the country of Jeanne
d'Arc and return by Toul, whose forts look out upon the invaded land.
Thus one comes to Nancy by night, and only by night, for twenty miles
beyond there are Germans and a German cannon, which not so long ago
sent a shell into the town and removed a whole city block beside the
railroad station. It is the sight of this ruin as you enter the town
which reminds you that you are at the front, but there are other
reminders.
As we ate our dinner in the cafe, facing the beautiful Place
Stanislas, we were disturbed by a strange and curious drumming sound.
Going out into the square, we saw an aeroplane, or rather its lights,
red and green, like those of a ship. It was the first of several, the
night patrol, rising slowly and steadily, and then sweeping off in a
wide curve toward the enemy's line. They were the sentries of the air
which were to guard us while we slept, for men do sentry-go in the air
as well as on the earth about the capital of Lorraine. Then the
searchlights on the hills began to play, sweeping the horizon toward
that same mysterious region where beyond the darkness there is war.
The next morning I woke with the sense of Fourth of July. Bang! Bang!
Bang! Such a barking of cannon crackers I had never heard. Still
drowsy, I pushed open the French windows and looked down on the
square. There I beheld a hundred or more men, women, and children,
their eyes fixed on something in the air above and behind the hotel.
Still the incessant barking of guns, with the occasional boom of
something more impressive. With difficulty I grasped the fact. I was
in the midst of a Taube raid. Somewhere over my head, invisible to me
because of the wall of my hotel, a German aeroplane was flying, and
all the anti-aircraft guns were shooting at it. Was it carrying bombs?
Should I presently see or feel the destruction following the descent
of these?
But the Taube turned away, the guns fired less and less frequently,
the people in the streets drifted away, the children to school, the
men to work, the women to wait. It was just a detail in their lives,
as familiar as the incoming steamer to the commuters on the North
River ferryboats. Some portion of war has been the day's history of
Nancy for nearly two years now. The children do not carry gas masks to
school with them as they do at Pont-a-Mousson, a dozen miles to the
north, but women and children have been killed by German shells, by
bombs, brought by Zeppelins and by aeroplanes. There is always
excitement of sorts in the district of Nancy.
After a breakfast, broken by the return of the aeroplanes we had seen
departing the night before for the patrol, we entered our cars and set
out for the front, for the near-front, for the lines a few miles
behind the present trenches, where Nancy was saved but two years ago.
Our route lay north along the valley of the Meurthe, a smiling broad
valley, marching north and south and meeting in a few miles that of
the Moselle coming east. It was easy to believe that one was riding
through the valley of the Susquehanna, with spring and peace in the
air. Toward the east a wall of hills shut out the view. This was the
shoulder of the Grand Couronne, the wall against which German
violence burst and broke in September, 1914.
Presently we came to a long stretch of road walled in on the river
side by brown canvas, exactly the sort of thing that is used at
football games to shut out the non-paying public. But it had another
purpose here. We were within the vision of the Germans, across the
river, on the heights behind the forest, which outlined itself at the
skyline; there were the Kaiser's troops and that forest was the
Bois-le-Pretre, the familiar incident in so many communiques since the
war began. Thanks to the canvas, it was possible for the French to
move troops along this road without inviting German shells. Yet it was
impossible to derive any large feeling of security from a canvas wall,
which alone interposed between you and German heavy artillery.
We passed through several villages and each was crowded with troops;
cavalry, infantry, all the branches represented; it was still early
and the soldiers were just beginning their day's work; war is so
completely a business here. Transport wagons marched along the roads,
companies of soldiers filed by. Interspersed with the soldiers were
civilians, the women and children, for none of the villages are
evacuated. Not even the occasional boom of a gun far off could give to
this thing the character of real war. It recalled the days of my
soldiering in the militia camp at Framingham in Massachusetts. It was
simply impossible to believe that it was real. Even the faces of the
soldiers were smiling. There was no such sense of terribleness, of
strain and weariness as I later found about Verdun. The Lorraine front
is now inactive, tranquil; it has been quiet so long that men have
forgotten all the carnage and horror of the earlier time.
We turned out of the valley and climbed abruptly up the hillside. In a
moment we came into the centre of a tiny village and looked into a row
of houses, whose roofs had been swept off by shell fire. Here and
there a whole house was gone; next door the house was undisturbed and
the women and children looked out of the doors. The village was St.
Genevieve, and we were at the extreme front of the French in August,
and against this hill burst the flood of German invasion. Leaving the
car we walked out of the village, and at the end of the street a sign
warned the wayfarer not to enter the fields, for which we were bound:
"War--do not trespass." This was the burden of the warning.
Once beyond this sign we came out suddenly upon an open plateau, upon
trenches. Northward the slope descended to a valley at our feet. It
was cut and seamed by trenches, and beyond the trenches stood the
posts that carried the barbed-wire entanglements. Here and there,
amidst the trenches, there were graves. I went down to the barbed-wire
entanglements and examined them curiously. They at least were real.
Once thousands of men had come up out of the little woods a quarter of
a mile below; they had come on in that famous massed attack, they
had come on in the face of machine gun and "seventy-fives." They had
just reached the wires, which marked high water. In the woods below,
the Bois de Facq, in the fields by the river 4,000 Germans had been
buried.
[Illustration: GERMAN LORRAINE (map)]
Looking out from the trenches the whole country unfolded. Northward
the little village of Atton slept under the steep slope of
Cote-de-Mousson, a round pinnacle crowned with an ancient chateau.
From the hill the German artillery had swept the ground where I stood.
Below the hill to the west was Pont-a-Mousson, the city of 150
bombardments, which the Germans took when they came south and lost
later. Above it was the Bois-le-Pretre, in which guns were now booming
occasionally. Far to the north was another hill, just visible, and its
slope toward us was cut and seamed with yellow slashes: Those were the
French trenches, then of the second or third line; beyond there was
still another hill, it was slightly blurred in the haze, but it was
not over five miles away, and it was occupied by the Germans. From the
slope above me on a clear day it is possible to see Metz, so near are
French and German lines to the old frontier.
Straight across the river to the west of us was another wood, with a
glorious name, the Forest of the Advance Guard. It swept to the south
of us. In that wood the Germans had also planted their guns on the day
of battle. They had swept the trenches where I stood from three sides.
Plainly it had been a warm corner. But the French had held on. Their
commander had received a verbal order to retreat. He insisted that it
should be put in writing, and this took time. The order came. It had
to be obeyed, but he obeyed slowly. Reluctantly the men left the
trenches they had held so long. They slipped southward along the road
by which we had come. But suddenly their rear guards discovered the
Germans were also retreating. So the French came back and the line of
St. Genevieve was held, the northern door to Nancy was not forced.
Looking down again it was not difficult to reconstitute that German
assault, made at night. The thing was so simple the civilian could
grasp it. A road ran through the valley and along it the Germans had
formed; the slope they had to advance up was gentle, far more gradual
than that of San Juan. They had been picked troops selected for a
forlorn hope, and they had come back four times. The next morning the
whole forest had been filled with dead and dying. Not less than a
division--20,000 men--had made the terrible venture. Now there was a
strange sense of emptiness in the country; war had come and gone, left
its graves, its trenches, its barbed-wire entanglements; but these
were all disappearing already. On this beautiful spring morning it was
impossible to feel the reality of what happened here, what was
happening now, in some measure, five miles or more to the north.
Nature is certainly the greatest of all pacifists; she will not permit
the signs of war to endure nor the mind to believe that war itself has
existed and exists.